Social anthropology and comparative epistemology.
Corsica, meerkats, hospitality, science, comparison, free speech…
I am a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
My research focuses on the nature, materiality, and politics of knowledge.
I have studied biologists, judges, and schoolteachers at work in France, the UK, and South Africa, the ways in which interpersonal and environmental knowledge shapes identity in the rural Mediterranean, and the history of social theory.
My most recent monograph was on the history and theory of the comparative method, and I am currently writing a book for Penguin on the comparative anthropology of free speech debates.
My doctoral research on the French Island of Corsica focused on the way in which knowing or refusing to know people, places and language shapes nationalist politics, liberal institutions and exclusion in Corsica. Along the way, I wrote about the ways in which anthropologists and their interlocutors define what counts as politics, and helped relaunch the anthropological study of hospitality - an old Mediterraneanist concern reinvented for the 21st century.
The question of how humans know and relate to places, landscapes and the more-than-human world was an important strand of this early work. In my second project, I followed this question into an ethnography of how scientists endeavour to understand the behaviour of non-human animals.
I published a range of articles based on this research which engaged critically with the rise of interspecies ethnography, and combined an interest in the material semiotics of scientific knowledge with a concern for objectivity and detachment as epistemic virtues.
In my most recent research, I returned to France to study the ways in which a high-profile Parisian courtroom focusing on press law manages what people can know and say about each other. This research formed part of a 6 year ERC-funded research project on the comparative study of freedom of speech.
A number of publications have already emerged from this research, including a bilingual edited special issue on censorship in the French journal Terrain, and a major co-edited volume entitled Freedoms of Speech with Toronto University Press. I am also in the process of writing a book on the anthropology of freedom of speech for Penguin, provisionally entitled Reason, Carnival and Honour: An Anthropology of Free Speech.
In parallel to these projects on knowledge in its various forms, I have kept up a thread of research and writing on the epistemology of anthropology and social science itself. From the productive limitations of ethnographic fieldwork, through the history of anthropology and social theory, to rethinking the nature of anthropological explanation and the heuristics of comparative method.
Candea, M. (2025) ‘French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 67(1) pp. 1–28.
Candea, M., P. Heywood, T. Fedirko & F. Wright n.d. (eds) 2025 Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological perspectives on language, ethics and power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Candea, M. (2025) ‘Comparing Freedoms: liberal freedom of speech in frontal and lateral perspective’, in M. Candea et al. (eds) Anthropologies of Free Speech: Comparative perspectives on language, ethics and power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
The Impossible Method
A conceptual history and constructive re-imagination of anthropologists' comparative method. With diagrams.
'Comparison in Anthropology is an exemplary blend of preaching and practice. Read it. Teach it. Object to it. And enjoy its incomparable effects.'
Andrew Shryock (read the full review)
Difference, Knowledge and Fieldwork
What was identity? And what comes next? An ethnographic exploration of belonging, knowledge and materiality in Corsica.
'It is hard to let go of this book, if only because its structure will lead many readers from the very last page back to the beginning again to contemplate anew what they have just read.'
H-France
